Social Media Is The Least Popular Channel For Customer Service [Survey]

While customer service complaints on social media may be the most public, they aren't the most popular (by a wide margin) according to a new study.

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Each time the calendar starts anew, it seems that we hear that it is finally the time that social media will unseat traditional methods for customer service. A new survey from M2Talk shows that we are world’s away from this becoming reality.

In a survey of 1,000 adults aged 25 and over the findings showed that the phone is still the most popular form of contact for customer service (33.5%) followed closely behind by email at 32.5%. Oh, and at the very bottom? That’s social media, with only 2% of users saying that it was the preferred method of customer service.

preferred-contact-method

Additional findings showed that not only is social media not the primary form of contact, but that 25% of respondents don’t use social media for customer service whatsoever. This number jumped even higher for respondents over 55 years in age with 39.7% saying that they’ve never used a social site for a customer service related inquiry.

One reason that the result may be so skewed is that not every brand leverages social media for customer service complaints. When some companies don’t engage in customer service socially it would significantly decrease the overall medium as the go-to source.

An additional discovery found that those that partook in “internet-based” customer service were 4% more likely to share negative customer service experiences and nearly 2% more likely to share positive experiences than those that preferred the phone as the main form of customer service.

For more information see the full Consumer Behavior and Customer Service report on M2Talk.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Finn
Contributor
Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.

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